The Last Guardian performs poorly on the base PS4

2016 has already seen dozens of big games, but it’s not finished just yet. This week, PS4 players finally get an opportunity to play The Last Guardian – the third game to be lead by famed auteur Fumito Ueda. It’s been a long nine years since development began, but it’s better late than never.

Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, Ueda’s previous projects on the PS2, have a well-deserved reputation for pushing video games forward. They weren’t really technical showpieces, but the stellar art direction, attention to detail, and clever use of game mechanics made them critical darlings.

The Last Guardian started out as a PS3 title in 2007, and was shown off for the first time at E3 2009. Years passed, Ueda left the employ of Sony, a new generation of consoles hit, and countless rumors of cancellation popped up along the way. But despite all of the challenges and criticism, the game is finally finished. That alone is a feat worth celebrating regardless of the quality of the actual product.

Over at IGN, the game scored a 7/10 — a “Good” rating. The tone, characters, and music all score high marks, but the development issues still show through. The camera is frustrating, the controls can make you pull your hair out, and those two problems make solving puzzles a real hassle.

With 62 reviews counted in Metacritic, The Last Guardian is sitting pretty at 83/100. It seems that, on the whole, most critics were able to overcome the game’s flaws to thoroughly enjoy the third (and likely final) installment of the Ueda-Sony union.

Unsurprisingly, the game ships with support for both the base PS4 and PS4 Pro. Complicating matters further, the PS4 Pro runs the game differently depending on whether or not you’re using a 4K UHD TV. There’s no in-game setting for resolution preferences or HDR, mind you – it must be manipulated manually at the OS level.

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So, what’s the best way to run the game? Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry captured footage from all three scenarios, and found that the performance varies wildly. The base model is frequently running in the mid-20s, and the PS4 Pro at 4K (rendering at 3360×1890) is only mildly improved. However, the PS4 Pro at 1080p delivers a nearly locked 30fps – the preferable option.

While the lackluster frame rate isn’t entirely unexpected from this team, it’s disappointing that they couldn’t rally to hit a solid 30fps on the most popular version of the hardware. And when you consider its history as a last-gen game, the inability to keep the frame rate stable is difficult to overlook.

In terms of art direction, we have no complaints. But with blurry textures and relatively basic geometry, it doesn’t look like a brand new current-gen title. It’s more along the lines of a remaster of a game that never even came out. It bums us out that The Last Guardian looks and feels dated, but at least we no longer have to discuss it every time E3 rolls around.